%0 Journal Article
%T Pilgrimages to the museums of the new age
%A Jaume Sastre-Juan
%D 2016
%V 6
%N Autumn 2016
%K New York Museum of Science and Industry
%K Museum of the Peaceful Arts
%K Museums of the New Age
%K museums of science and industry
%K industrial museums
%X How did industrial museums cross the Atlantic? When the first American museums of science and industry were created in the 1920s, they looked to Europe in order to import what was seen at that time as a burgeoning cultural institution. In this article, I look at this process of appropriation through an analysis of the changing perceptions of European industrial museums as expressed in the reports, surveys and books written by the curators, directors and trustees of the New York Museum of Science and Industry. I will pay particular attention to the 1927 film Museums of the New Age, documenting the main national industrial museums in Europe, and to a 1937 report on the techniques of display at the Palais de la Découverte. I will argue that their contrasting assessment of European industrial museums, which in only ten years ceased to be seen as cathedrals of a new age to become old-fashioned storehouses, is symptomatic of the significant transformation of museums of science and industry as cultural institutions during the 1930s in the United States.
%Z ‘Industrial museum is aided by movie’, New York Times, 30 November 1927, p 22
%Z Another New Yorker who visited with delight the European industrial museums was Lewis Mumford, who toured them in 1932, funded by the Guggenheim Foundation, while conducting research for his ground-breaking Technics and Civilization (Molella, 1990, pp 28–31).
%Z The terms ‘Grand Tour’ and ‘pilgrimage’ have already been applied to the European trips of American curators by Jones (2001, pp 107–109).
%Z Brown travelled to Europe in the summer of 1928, accompanied by William Henry Fox, the director of the Brooklyn Museum, and Howard McClenahan, the secretary of Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute. Their trip is described in: Brown, 1929.
%Z For an excellent and exhaustive account of this transformation from the point of view of museums of natural history and science, see: Rader and Cain, 2014, chapter 3. For a detailed analysis of this process focused on the changing politics of display at the New York Museum of Science and Industry, see: Sastre-Juan, 2013. For a more global treatment, see: Guay, 1987.
%Z Towne had been the president of the Merchants’ Association. On Towne’s figure and ideological background, see: McGrath, 2002, chapter 1.
%Z ‘Deutsches Museum head visits American cities’, Museum News, 15 November 1925, p 11. It would not be his last visit to New York in order to support the Museum of the Peaceful Arts: ‘Business men laud “daddy” of museums’, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 7 December 1929, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume I, p 139.
%Z ‘Illness delays active work of professor Richards’, Museum News, 1 June 1924, p 2. In addition to the publication of The Industrial Museum, the 1924 trip also resulted in the publication, two years later, of a book on museums of industrial arts (Richards, 1927).
%Z Apart from teaching and playing leading roles at institutions such as the Pratt Institute, Columbia University’s Teachers College or Cooper Union, Charles Richards had been the president of the National Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education. He was also the president of the American Association of Museums between 1923 and 1927.
%Z The naturalisation of social relations was not restricted to industrial museums. Donna Haraway has analysed New York City’s American Museum of Natural History in the 1920s as a semiotic machine and a ritualistic space in which the capitalist patriarchal self was produced through visual technologies such as dioramas (Haraway, 1985).
%Z Richards preferred the smaller Technisches Museum because the Deutsches Museum had ‘reached the point where the significant is in danger of being overwhelmed by quantity and complexity’ (Richards, 1925, p 53).
%Z ‘Museum of Peaceful Arts gets under way: experts visit Europe to study exhibits. Nucleus of staff developed in New York’, Museum News, 15 May 1926, p 1. The trustees who travelled to Europe were Elmer Sperry (inventor), J W Lieb (vice-president of the Edison Company), Samuel Stratton (president of the MIT), Louis Livingston Seaman (physician) and H Foster Bain (secretary of the American Institution of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers and former director of the US Bureau of Mines). The only extant report is: Bain, H F, 1926, ‘Memorandum regarding mining and metallurgical exhibits in the Technological Museum at Vienna and the Deutsches Museum at Munich’, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume IV, pp 119–125.
%Z Rice, C, Mitman, C and Roe, J, 1926, ‘Preliminary recommendations for the Museum of the Peaceful Arts’, Manuscripts Collection, New York Historical Society. Mitman, who had been one of the main characters behind the failed National Museum of Engineering Industries (Molella, 1991), was the curator of mineral and mechanical technology at the Smithsonian Institution and had been hired for six months as assistant director of the New York museum. Joseph Roe was Professor at New York University and collaborated closely with the museum as expert in the history of machine-tools.
%Z The machine-tools section, for example, consisted in two divisions devoted to the elements and types of machine-tools, and a third one devoted to reconstructing the historical evolution of old shops (Ibidem, p 56).
%Z Ibidem, pp 4–15.
%Z More research is needed to illuminate the history of the production, use and reception of the films. According to the copies donated to the Science Museum on 21 March 1928 (‘Films-General’, Science Museum Records Centre, file SCM 8291) the three films were: Museums of the New Age (3,600 feet), Big Industries in Little (900 feet) and The Building and Operation of Industrial Museums (1,700 feet). For the purposes of this article, I will only focus on and describe Museums of the New Age, which contemporary sources refer to as ‘the principal film’ (‘World industrial museums shown in film’, American Machinist, 8 December 1927, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume I, p 48). The Building and Operation of Industrial Museums is a more technical film dealing with issues such as location, architecture, arrangement of spaces, personnel, maintenance and production of exhibits at the museums’ workshops. I have not had access to Big Industries in Little.
%Z ‘Trade museum spurred by films’, New York Times, 21 December 1927, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume I, p 48; ‘Board of Trade shows industrial museum films’, Bronx Home News, 18 January 1928, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume I, p 50.
%Z ‘Display of museum such as is to be erected in Bronx will be shown as movie subject’, The Home News, 15 January 1928, Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volume I, p 49.
%Z For a similar view from Chicago, see: Kaempffert, W, ‘The great museum of the machine age’, New York Times Magazine, 26 October 1930, pp 4–5.
%Z The project for a monumental building for the Museum of the Peaceful Arts can be consulted in: Museums of the Peaceful Arts Records, Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Volumes III, V and VII. The first part of The Building and Operation of Industrial Museums is devoted to the architecture and spatial arrangements of the Conservatoire, the Science Museum, the Deutsches Museum and the Technisches Museum in order to suggest to potential donors that an impressive building that could rival the European counterparts should be built in New York (Gwynne, 1927c, 01.10 – 17.25).
%Z ‘Models to be purchased from museums’, folder 3, box 7, F C Brown Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History
%Z In Chicago, the ambitious initial attempt by Waldemar Kaempffert at musealising the social consequences of science clashed with the interests of the trustees, who favoured a more uncontroversial narrative that would eventually turn into plain corporate boosterism when Lenox Lohr assumed the presidency of the museum in 1940 (Mann, 1988).
%Z Shaw, R, 1937, ‘Report on studies of Palace of Discovery, Paris International Exposition, museums of science and industry, and other exhibitions in Europe’, folder 3119, box 262, Record Group 1.1., Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center.
%Z Ibidem, pp 52–53
%Z Ibidem, p 53
%Z Ibidem, p 54
%Z Ibidem, p 53
%Z Ibidem, pp 60–61
%Z Ibidem, p 72
%Z Ibidem, pp 70–71. On the Children’s Gallery, see: Nielsen, 2014
%Z For a reassessment of the history of the Palais, see: Bergeron and Bigg, 2015.
%Z Shaw, R, 1937, ‘Report on studies of Palace of Discovery, Paris International Exposition, museums of science and industry, and other exhibitions in Europe’, folder 3119, box 262, Record Group 1.1., Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, p 4
%Z Ibidem, pp 3–20
%Z For an analysis of the transatlantic circulation and appropriation in diverse cultural and political settings of exhibits and techniques of display, such as the Transparent Man or pictorial statistics, see: Canadelli, 2016; Charles and Giraud, 2013.
%I The Science Museum Group
%@ 2054-5770
%B eng
%U http://journal.sciencemuseum.org.uk/browse/issue-06/pilgrimages-to-the-museums-of-the-new-age/
%J Science Museum Group Journal